Top 100 Larry Niven Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.”

— Larry Niven

52. “Stupidity is always a capital crime.”

— Larry Niven

53. “Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.”

— Larry Niven

54. “We’re looking as far ahead as we can, and we don’t get penalized for mistakes.”

— Larry Niven

55. “I’m not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.”

— Larry Niven

56. “Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.”

— Larry Niven

57. “In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

— Larry Niven

58. “I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.”

— Larry Niven

59. “I’d visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.”

— Larry Niven

60. “If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over.”

— Larry Niven

61. “Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.”

— Larry Niven

62. “As for AIDS, it’s a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it’s a quarter; after that it’s a childhood disease.”

— Larry Niven

63. “Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.”

— Larry Niven

64. “The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He’s entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you’re in violation.”

— Larry Niven

65. “The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.”

— Larry Niven

66. “In general, I don’t know when inspiration will pop up.”

— Larry Niven

67. “I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That’s what we have to count on.”

— Larry Niven

68. “I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I’m trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.”

— Larry Niven

69. “I don’t have a strong interest in history.”

— Larry Niven

70. “I’ve got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.”

— Larry Niven

71. “SF isn’t a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.”

— Larry Niven

72. “The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.”

— Larry Niven

73. “My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.”

— Larry Niven

74. “In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.”

— Larry Niven

75. “In a collaboration, each author will do 75% of the work.”

— Larry Niven

76. “It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.”

— Larry Niven

77. “We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.”

— Larry Niven

78. “I’ve spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.”

— Larry Niven

79. “Jesus Pietro wasn’t used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.”

— Larry Niven

80. “I do not believe they’ve run out of surprises.”

— Larry Niven

81. “Treat your life like something to be sculpted.”

— Larry Niven

82. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Matthew 7:3.”

— Larry Niven

83. “Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he’s relatively new, but I don’t know how long he’s been doing it; he probably doesn’t need the publicity anymore!”

— Larry Niven

84. “And every friend I’ve got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I’d never catch up.”

— Larry Niven

85. “You probably used fusion bombs against the Girls.”

— Larry Niven

86. “Gradually he was learning the size, the scale of the Ringworld. It was unpleasant, like all learning processes. He.”

— Larry Niven

87. “Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat’s Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon’s Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary’s Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He’d packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.”

— Larry Niven

88. “Nessus sprawled bonelessly in his couch. He looked ridiculously, ludicrously comfortable.”

— Larry Niven

89. “This place is a playground for a questing mind.”

— Larry Niven

90. “Did I still remember how to let my mind play?”

— Larry Niven

91. “He understood when the kzin kitten looked up at its parent and asked, “Is it good to eat?” The adult’s eyes met Louis’s eyes. Louis let his smile widen to show the teeth. The adult said, “No.” In the confidence of four Man-Kzin wars plus some “incidents” – all centuries in the past, but all won by men – Louis grinned and nodded. You tell him, Daddy! Its safer to eat white arsenic than human meat!”

— Larry Niven

92. “God was knocking, and he wanted in bad.”

— Larry Niven

93. “I’ll have to get over this sooner or later, Louis thought. Why not now? A friend had taught him this cantrip, this bit of magic for recovering from shock or grief. Sometimes it worked.”

— Larry Niven

94. “It does not disturb me to play a god,” he said. “It disturbs me to play a god badly.”

— Larry Niven

95. “Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.”

— Larry Niven

96. “One must travel all the way to the center. To know and hate evil is one path to knowing good.”

— Larry Niven

97. “Her eyes glowed. She spoke as if confiding a secret. “Have you noticed the moonlight?”

— Larry Niven

98. “The priest splayed his digits wide. “Herdmaster, I learn. Later I will speak.” “You do not seem pleased.” There was no answer. “A place of puzzles,” Pastempeh-keph said. “They surrender and have not surrendered. Their tapes show rogues acting in collusion. They live neither in herds nor alone. What are they?” “What do they believe themselves to be?” Fistarteh-thuktun asked. “Perhaps that is more important.”

— Larry Niven

99. “Halrloprillalar’s tale of the bacterium that eats superconductor is in our records,” the Hindmost said.”

— Larry Niven

100. “Because she was designed human, before Nessus made her something else. Tanj him! Do you see what he did? He created god in his own image, his own idealized image, and he got Teela Brown. “She’s just what any puppeteer would give his soul to be. She can’t be injured. She can’t even be uncomfortable, unless it’s for her own benefit.”

— Larry Niven